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Thursday, May 18, 2017

Blog Tour: Naming Rites by Gary Boelhower #Excerpt #Giveaway

Title: Naming Rites

Author: Gary Boelhower

Release Date: May 16th 2017

Genre: Poetry

BLURBGary Boelhower’s third collection of poems explores the ways we are named and branded with multiple identities, a clay vessel molded and imprinted from the inside and the outside by those who know us or think they do, by wounds, worries, stones, and nicknames, by place and absence, by teachers and traitors. Boelhower dares to name the body’s blows and pleasures and how they are celebrated in solitude and connection. His language soars with ecstasy and burrows into hidden places in the soul. His lyrics tell how the world’s pain lodges in the cells and how the fragrance of summer stars opens an aperture to healing. Boelhower is winner of the Foley Prize from America and the Midwest Book Award for his second collection Marrow, Muscle, Flight.

Naming Rites is such a generous collection it
offers both blessings and confessions, dirt and bread, miracles and explosions,
cruelty and mercy, great blue herons who resemble monks and blue jays clowning
around, a lover's tender touch and the horrors of the nightly news. In second
grade, Gary Boelhower admits, he won 'the glow-in-the-dark statue of Mary,' and
his religious drive, now mature, is still alive in these poems. They aim for
(and often achieve) not just a personal record but transubstantiation,
transforming experience into wisdom, fear into freedom, language into song. Naming Rites is the autobiography of a
soul, reaching out beyond the boundaries of the self. Bart Sutter, author of Cow Calls
in Dalarna and Chester Creek Ravine:
Haiku

Gary
Boelhower's poems resist convention and confinement even as they speak deeply
of and from history, family, and community. The persona names and narrates
himself into being as he chronicles profound and tender encounters as well as
'tectonic shifts and betrayals.' Software engineers meditate, children go
hungry, and faith is lost and reconfigured. 'Let me not forget to be what I
have spoken,' Boelhower reminds himself and his readers. Naming Rites is an important and sustaining book for our times,
with its 'cadence that calls us into the streets with voices/of protest and
hope.' Julie Gard, author of Home Studies

EXCERPT

IN THE SILENCE

footsteps
crunch on the cold snow

heaven’s
full of falling mercy

the big
arms of the pine

spread in
prayer shawled in white

the whole
everyday machine muffled

if
everyone could say their name

in such
silence we might hear

each one
might send their small swirl

of hopes
and prayers

spiraling
out like sufi robes

in the
dervish dance

and we
might all

hear each
other’s hands rise up

and we
would know the one world’s song

all our
rituals are attempts at listening

all our
songs a preparation

for
emptiness when our words

have all
fallen away because we know

we are
all whirling together

wherever
you are however you do it

notice
how we are all whirling together

in the
great round dance

on this
tiny rock with fire in its soul

through
the grand galaxies

spinning
with mercy and wonder

Author Bio

Gary Boelhower’s poetry has been published in many anthologies and journals. His second collection of poems published in 2011, Marrow, Muscle, Flight won the Midwest Book Award. He was awarded the Foley Prize in poetry from America magazine
in 2012 and a career development grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts
Council in 2010. His recent nonfiction books include Choose Wisely: Practical Insights from Spiritual Traditions, and Mountain 10: Climbing the Labyrinth Within,(co-authored with Joe Miguez and Tricia Pearce). His third collection of poems, Naming Rites, was published in Aprilby
Holy Cow! Press. Gary teaches courses in spirituality, ethics and
leadership at The College of St. Scholastica where he is a professor in
the Theology and Religious Studies Department.